Sure, if your only interest in life is in producing unreadably acceptable papers and of course the obligatory unreadable book, and you have so little self respect you are willing to do just about anything to please “those who must be obeyed,” then maybe the system is your cup of tea. I won’t even mention all those loans that will burden you for the rest of your life. In my day we were actually paid to be grad students, so I never had THAT particular problem.

I got out after three years, and never regretted it. And no, I was not bounced out, I was in fact reappointed (after a battle royale) but decided to resign anyhow — in disgust. From then on I became a firm believer in part time teaching, which is how I supported myself and my wife for many years.

For me the ideal job is as an under-the-radar part-timer (aka “adjunct”), routinely rehired year after year unless I truly mess up big time (which I never did, thankfully). It’s amazing how it’s possible to survive on what for the average full professor would be vacation money. The great advantage is that, as a part timer, one never needs a vacation. One’s life is a great big vacation, during which one has ample time to do something truly useful and rewarding.

The tenure system is among the most insidious, unfair and destructive aspects of “Western” culture, right up there with the banking system, imho. Good people have killed themselves over tenure, both figuratively and literally. And many campuses have been disrupted due to absurd tenure disputes. Now that’s it’s just about impossible to get on that tenure track anyhow, my advice is, very simply: why bother?

I think that the problems sometimes is that departments have only “cosmopolitans” which is itself a sub-culture. I would think that a good dept would have a mix. Cosmopolitans look for people like themselves, as surely as locals do. How often have I heard that so-and-so must be good because of a similar pedigree from a distant high status university?

I would not define a department composed of only people from Brown, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, and Duke as being particularly “diverse,” though it may be pretty cosmopolitan.

As for spousal hires…that is a modern reality. I have mixed feelings about the situation people and departments find themselves in, and don’t know of any magic formula.

I’ve long thought that this was the case, and have always recommended that grad students and job seekers always publish as if they were at the institution of their dreams — since that’s how they would have to publish if they landed that job.

It’s the best advice. Aside from reading Karen Kelsky!

Anyways, these are the sorts of things that fellow job seekers commiserate over at the pub on Friday nights, so its very enlightening to read these comments and analysis.

@Radokane:

I agree. A more robust survey would be great. Unfortunately, I think it’s highly unlikely. Part of the problem is that the people you most want to reach — those who have mustered out of the academic work force — are the ones least likely to be found. If they no longer participate in disciplinary organizations, they’re probably lost to any survey (and even those people who do belong to organizations like the AAA are hard to get survey data out of…). So there would be huge sampling errors. And you would also want to get data from other disciplines, and then the problem would just magnify.

@Barbara & John:

You get to a really interesting tension in the hiring process: in many ways, people are looked at as if they’ve been on the tenure track whether or not they actually are. So if someone is out for 5 years, they should be able to go up for tenure in a year or two. Or if they’ve been out for a year or more, they should have at least an article each year. I’ve long thought that this was the case, and have always recommended that grad students and job seekers always publish as if they were at the institution of their dreams — since that’s how they would have to publish if they landed that job. But it does seem to reinforce the window of opportunity being 5-6 years: if you could go up for tenure at that point, then you should still be marketable. But if you can’t get tenure, then it might be time to throw in the towel.

@Tony & John:

I always talk about the need to find a job somewhere other than where you got your Ph.D. (and I mean geography here, not institution) as a kind of cosmopolitanism. If every department was full of people who had received their Ph.D.s nearby, the stagnation of social reproduction would get pretty intense pretty quickly. So people want colleagues from other places who represent other genealogies of thought — which is just what anthropology is about, right?

A faculty candidate who has 2-3 peer-reviewed journal articles per year following the Ph.D. has a very strong chance of getting a tenure-track job. Some of the articles can be replaced by a book contract with a solid university press for the dissertation work.

Why is this? Hiring committees must to the extent possible hire candidates who (assuming their productivity continues) will earn tenure. Maintaining 2-3 peer-reviewed journal articles per year, or a second book with a solid university press, are strong qualifications for tenure.

Five years post Ph.D., with only 0-1 publications per year, is not a record likely to earn tenure, even with superlative teaching marks. To hire a candidate with this record, the hiring committee must take the risk that productivity will increase.

Contrariwise, three or four years post-Ph.D. with 2 publications per year (or a book plus some publications) is a strong record. Most of those candidates will have been hired somewhere before they get to year 5 post-Ph.D.

Obviously, many other factors come into play for any particular job search, or any particular candidate. There are extremely well-qualified people who could earn tenure anywhere, but personal ties keep them from applying nationwide. There are new PhDs with no publications who land plum jobs.

This certainly drives the window you discuss, and speaking again from the hiring side, I think we would be at least slightly skeptical of a job candidate with more than 5 post-PhD years as an adjunct. 2-3 years is a reasonable “postdoc” period, 5-6 years is beginning to look like a permanent “adjunct.”